1982 - An Ice-Cream War (47 page)

Wheech-Browning stumbled towards them, his face white.

“Good Lord,” he said. “Christ. It’s a body.” He put his hand on his throat. “No head.”

“No head?” Felix said with alarm.

“Bloody flies!” Wheech-Browning said. “Where do they all come from? A huge empty plain. That’s what I want to know.”

Temple walked forward with Felix. He looked across at him. His face was slightly screwed up, as if he were walking through a cloud of smoke or gas.

The body lay on its belly in a wide clearing of violently torn and trampled grass. The birds had already pecked away both calves and the porcelain gleam of exposed ribs shone beneath the tattered shirt.

“Army boots,” Temple said, not wanting to speculate further.

“Looks too small for Gabriel,” Felix said bravely. “He was a big chap, Gabriel.”

Wheech-Browning rejoined them. By now they were all covered with flies, flies crawling all over their faces, oblivious to their waving hands. Temple took some paces to one side.

“It’s been chopped off,” he said. “That wasn’t an animal.”

“My Christ,” said Wheech-Browning. He suddenly leant forward from the waist and vomited. He straightened up unsteadily, wiping his mouth. “Phew,” he said. “There goes breakfast.”

As if on some unspoken order they withdrew to the mules.

“What the hell is going on?” Temple said. “Who chops off a man’s head in the middle of the veldt?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not Gabriel,” Felix said. He swallowed heavily. “I think. I mean you can’t tell. Without…”

“Who is it, then?” Temple said. “Von Bishop?”

“Where’s the head, though?” Wheech-Browning asked. “Why carry off the head? I don’t understand.”

Temple suddenly recalled the mound of earth at the camp. “You stay here,” he said to Wheech-Browning. “Keep the birds off. We’re going back to the camp-site.”

“Scarecrow,” Wheech-Browning said, holding his hands out from his side. “That’s what the chaps called me at school.”

Temple and Felix rode back to the camp-site.

“What is it?” Felix asked.

“I think they’ve buried the head there,” Temple indicated the mound.

“Oh God.”

“Shall I do it or will you?”

“I think you should.”

Temple got down on his knees and began digging away the loosely tamped earth with his hands. Six inches down his fingers struck something soft. He felt his mouth swim with saliva. He dug some more. The head was wrapped in a square of blanket.

He turned round. “It’s here,” he called to Felix, who was standing some yards away. Felix came over. Temple could see his jaw muscles were clenched with effort. His top lip and growth of beard were dewed with sweat. He looked down at the blanket-wrapped head. He took a long quivering breath.

“Could you…please.”

Temple reached down into the hole and carefully un-wrapped the head. He saw a squarish handsome face, very white and thin, with open eyes and mouth. He wiped away some of the larger ants. The hair was pale brown and tousled. Something about it made it looKARtificial.

He looked round and saw Felix crying silently, his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking.

“Poor Gabe,” he heard him say.

Temple wrapped up the head again. Then he stood up and walked over to Felix. He put his hand on his shoulder for a second. He didn’t know what to say. He felt an inexpressible sorrow for the young man. He walked away from him, past the two scouts who tended their mules, kicking savagely at the grass as he went. He took some deep breaths, looked up at the sky, beat some dust from his trousers. Off in the distance he could see Wheech-Browning capering madly around the corpse, waving his long arms at the wheeling birds as if he were putting on a performance for them. His yells and whoops carried faintly across the grass.

Temple walked back to Felix.

“What made him do that?” Felix asked hoarsely. “Why did he need to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Temple said. “I don’t have any idea.”

“What’s his name?”

“Von Bishop.”

“I just don’t understand,” Felix said softly, a tremor distorting his voice. “What would make anyone do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know,” Temple said with some vehemence. “It just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.”

After the War

15 May 1918,
Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa

“Snap!”

“Eh?”

“Snap. I win,” Felix said. “
Ganhador
. Me.”

“Oh. Oh, sim.”

“
Terminar?
”

“
Sim. Sim
.”

Felix noted down his victory. It took his score to 1,743 games of snap. His opponent, Capitao Pinto, had won thirty-four. Felix put the cards away. The capitao turned for consolation to his erotic books.

Capitao Aristedes Pinto was dying of tertiary syphilis. Or so he said. This fact didn’t bother Felix so much as the histrionic way the captain flicked through his small but well-handled collection of pornography. As he turned the pages of dim photographs and extravagant etchings he would sigh wistfully and shake his head as if to say, “Look at the trouble you naughty girls have got me into.” Occasionally he would give a fond chuckle and pass one of the books over to Felix for his perusal. Initially, Felix had indeed been intrigued to look at the pictures—mainly of plump girls in bordellos, with their breasts hanging out of satin slips, or skirts routinely raised to reveal huge creamy buttocks or luxuriant pudenda—but now it was just another irritation. The girls all smiled and posed with little coquettishness, almost as if they were drugged. Felix thought of his own solitary encounter with a prostitute in Bloomsbury Square. It seemed like decades ago, in another world.

Pinto was a small fat man with a pencil moustache, a festering sore in one nostril and one smoked blind eye. His uniform was constantly smeared and dirty, but for all that he was an amiable sort of fellow, Felix thought, and he seemed to find it not in the slightest bit out of the ordinary that he—a non-English speaker—should have to liaise with an English officer who in turn spoke no Portuguese. Felix had been sharing quarters with him at Boma Durio for getting on for three months and, thanks to the absence of a common vocabulary, they had never had a cross word.

Pinto pushed the book across the table and Felix obligingly scrutinized the picture.

“
Francez
,” Pinto moaned. He parted his lips in a grimace of ecstatic pain, exposing his four silver and two gold teeth. “
Diabolico!
” He blew on his fingertips and launched into a lengthy reminiscence in Portuguese. It was an impossible language, Felix thought, full of thudding consonants and slushing noises. He’d been trying to learn it for three months with the aid of a crude dictionary he’d bought in Porto Amelia but he couldn’t even pronounce it. Pinto had been making better progress with his English and spoke a little French, and through a combination of all three languages they just about managed to communicate. It was almost as difficult as talking to Gilzean. Felix shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He worried that he’d let Gilzean down rather, given him false hopes. His gloomy sergeant had died of blackwater fever three days before Christmas 1917. Poor Gilzean.

Pinto went back to his book and Felix took the opportunity to stroll outside.

Boma Durio was a huge earthwork fort, roughly two hundred yards square, set on a hill a mile away from Durio village somewhere in the middle of Portuguese East Africa. In one corner of the square was a red-bricked tin-roofed building which was Felix’s and Pinto’s quarters. Nearby were half a dozen large but flimsy grass huts which housed Pinto’s servants, his three young negro concubines and the half company of Portuguese native troops and their camp followers. The rest of the square was empty. That morning it had been filled with six hundred potters and their loads of yams, manioc, rice, sugar cane and sweet potatoes—provisions for some of the twelve thousand British and Empire troops still chasing von Lettow and his small army up and down Portuguese East Africa.

It was late afternoon. The light was soft and damp. Noting Felix emerge from his quarters Human came over to see if there was anything he wanted. Human was Felix’s sole remaining contact with the Nigerian Brigade, all of whom had been shipped home some months previously. Human had volunteered to follow Felix in his cross-posting, and Felix had been touched and surprised by his loyalty.

Back in November 1917, after von Lettow had successfully crossed the Rovuma at the Ludjenda confluence, the Nigerian Brigade had been recalled to Lindi. There, after a few weeks, they had learnt they were to be sent back to Nigeria. Felix had immediately applied for a cross-posting to the King’s African Rifles—now some twenty battalions strong—on whom the future brunt of the war in East Africa was to rest. For some mystifying reason it had been turned down. In desperation he recalled Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job with GSO II (Intelligence). He got in touch with Wheech-Browning, applied and was immediately accepted. He became a Special Services officer seconded to the Portuguese army. No-one ever thought to check up on his qualifications. “Believe me, Cobb,” Wheech-Browning had said with great enthusiasm, “your Portuguese is going to be the most tremendous asset.”

Felix imagined he would be in the front line liaising between the KAR and the Portuguese units who were being led a merry dance by von Lettow. In a confident mood he sailed from Lindi to Porto Amelia in northern Portuguese East Africa. It was from Porto Amelia that the main thrust in-land by the British columns—designated ‘Pamforce’ by the ever-imaginative army staff—was issuing. But, instead of fighting, Felix discovered that he was to be a requisitions officer organizing food supplies for the KAR troops. He had been sent to Boma Durio, some hundred and fifty miles from Porto Amelia in Nyana Province, which was in the midst of a fertile area of farm land. Here he received his instructions for supplies for ‘Pamforce’. Pinto and his men collected the food from surrounding farms and native settlements and carriers transported it to whichever area the British army happened to be fighting in.

Anguished complaints and protests to Wheech-Browning at headquarters in Porto Amelia had achieved nothing. “You’re doing a vital job, man,” Wheech-Browning said. “You can’t treat the war as a personal vendetta.”

So Felix lingered at Boma Durio, unable to pursue von Lettow, feeling frustrated and hard done by. Pinto did all the real work with surprising efficiency. Felix signed requisition orders, paid for the food and kept accounts. Every fortnight or so he received a visit from Wheech-Browning who kept him in touch with the course of the war and brought him a few home comforts from Porto Amelia.

But for all the deadening monotony of the work and the steamy lethargic atmosphere of Boma Durio Felix found his hatred of von Bishop never left him. He thought about Gabriel’s death constantly, trying to puzzle out what had happened on the plateau: what dreadful struggle had torn up the grass, why his brother’s body had been mutilated. His desire for revenge never left him. It was like the nagging pain of an ulcer: some sort of normal life was possible, but the pain never went away.

Felix walked across the compound and climbed the steps onto the earthwork ramparts. Below the walls ran a deep ditch and beyond that the ground sloped down to a small river. The road from the Boma crossed it on a small wooden bridge and meandered down hill for a mile or so to Durio village. The countryside around was lush. Lining the river were huge stands of bamboo, some of the central trunks as thick as a man. On either side of the track to the village, where the ground wasn’t cultivated, elephant grass grew to a height of nine feet. Anything stuck in the ground here took root at once, Felix had observed. Human had cut some poles to act as supports for a washing line. Within two weeks new shoots and leaves were sprouting from them. Now they resembled miniature trees.

Felix lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the flies buzzing round his head. Two days ago it had been Gabriel’s birthday. He would have been thirty-one. He thought back to that terrible day on the Makonde plateau. They had buried Gabriel at the side of his final camp, in the hollow between the two spurs of rock. Wheech-Browning and Temple had carried the body over and the askaris had dug the grave. Felix had done nothing, overwhelmed by the enormous grief and the surging emotions in his body. They covered the grave with rocks and Wheech-Browning said the few words he could remember from the burial service. Temple had marked the kopje accurately on his map so that they would know where to find it again. By then there was no point in continuing after von Bishop and they had returned to Nanda. Felix had wanted to speak to the von Bishop woman but she and the other civilians had already been moved to Dar. Shortly after this, Temple learnt that he was being recalled to Nairobi. He said he was glad to be leaving. He left Felix to continue the chase.

Felix threw his cigarette over the ramparts and turned to look at the cluster of huts in the Boma. He saw Pinto emerge from their brick building and watched him stretch and stamp his tubby frame into activity.

“Felix!” Pinto shouted, looking around for him.

“Aristedes,” Felix replied. “Up here.”

Pinto puffed up the steps to the ramparts.

“
Telefon
,” he panted, showing his array of gold and silver teeth. “
Wheesh-Brownim. Stokesh gonz
.” He prattled on. Felix registered Stokes guns. Wheech-Browning was coming with Stokes guns. But when?

“Um. Ah…
presentamente?
” Felix asked.

“
Nao. Eh…Demain. Sim. Demain
.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Nao.
Demain. Demain
.”

“
Sim
.”

They nodded and smiled at each other. Then they turned and surveyed the view. It was extremely familiar. Nonetheless, Pinto started pointing out features in the landscape but Felix didn’t understand him. All the same he nodded, and said ‘Sim’ from time to time.

The sun began to sink and the light thickened. In the ditch frogs croaked and the first crickets began to trill. The mosquitoes came out from the shadows they had been resting in all day and began to whine around Felix’s ears. He felt a great weight of melancholy descend easily on him; an acute sense of how futile all his efforts had been, of all the human cost of the last two years. Charis, Gabriel…The list went on. Gilzean, Cyril, Bilderbeck, Parrott, Loveday. Then there were the wounded: Nigel Bathe, Cave-Bruce-Cave, his father. Then there were the unremembered casualties: the men in his platoon and company, the poisoned porters at Kibongo. And that was just one person. Think of everybody with their own list: Temple, Wheech-Browning, Gabriel, Aristedes—then everybody in East Africa and Europe. He could only mourn in the vaguest sense for the others, but when he thought of his personal list of names he felt his anger return. How could he just
accept
these casualties? He couldn’t be fatalistic about them any more. That was why he had joined up after Charis’s death, why he felt he had at least to try and find Gabriel…He ruefully acknowledged his own dishonesty here. There had been other motives too: fear, self-preservation, worry, guilt. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was that efforts had to be made, responsibilities shouldered, blame apportioned. He couldn’t simply let it go. But he had his guilty man now. Von Bishop carried the heavy freight of all his grievances.